Effects of Organizational Changes on Product Metrics and Defects

The development organization often changes during software development. Derivative developments, forks, and change of developers due to acquisition or open-sourcing are some conceivable situations. However, the impact of this change on software quality has yet to be elucidated. Herein we introduce the concept of origins to study the effects of organizational changes on software quality. A file´s origin is defined as its creation and modification history. Using the concept of origins, we analyze two open source projects, Open Office and Virtual Box, which were each developed by a total of three organizations. We conduct statistical analysis to investigate the relationship between the origins, product metrics, the number of modifications, and defects. Results show that files that are created or modified by multiple organizations or by later organizations tend to be faultier due to the increase in complexity and modification frequency.